Turn on the news or flip through a magazine and you are
confronted with stories of greed, avarice, carnality and
debauchery. Our media outlets believe that such subjects
encourage higher ratings, and a whole new species of media
personality has sprouted as a result—the pundit. The
pundit’s self-appointed mission is to explain us to
ourselves, even though only very few of them exhibit any
readily identifiable qualifications. Mostly, they just flap
their lips, ensorcelled by the sound of their own voices.
If you watch these sorts of people long enough (which is
about as fun as performing your own dental work) you will
eventually hear one of them compare contemporary America
with ancient Rome. It happens from one end of the sociopolitical
spectrum to the other, and is uniformly meant as an insult.

It’s also really silly. We are no
more or less like ancient Rome than we are any other ancient culture. Rome is
an easy target, though, because we are fed from grade school with tales of its
horrific excesses—empire-making, slavery, ostentatious displays of wealth
juxtaposed against jaw-dropping poverty, the shocking brutality of the Games,
the ugliness of the vomitorium—exemplified by the (now known to be fictional)
story of Emperor Nero contentedly fiddling while Rome burned to the ground around
him. While there is no doubt that some revolting shit took place in Rome and
among Romans, it happened quite sporadically and was largely confined to a period
of a hundred or so years, beginning right after the death of Caesar (44 B.C.)
and lasting roughly until the ascension of Trajan (98 A.D.). During this short
span of time lived the Emperors whose cruelty, indulgence and insanity became
the stuff of legend and besmirched all things Roman for a thousand years—Tiberius,
Caligula, Claudius and Nero.

But enough with the history lesson. What’s
important to us today is to illustrate one fundamental way Roman culture can
reasonably be compared to ours—drinking. The Romans loved to drink every
bit as much as we do, maybe even more, and their beverage of choice was Wine.

From its dimmest past to the height of its empire and global
influence, Rome adored wine. They drank it for taste, they
drank it as part of numerous religious rites, they traded
for it in the farthest reaches of their empire, they cooked
with it, they studied it with their rudimentary sciences,
they dried it out and used it to dye fabric and rouge pale
cheeks. It was a key element of their social lives and their
medical practices. High-born citizens were judged, not by
the silver in their vaults, but by the quality of their vineyards.
The middle class, émigrés, and slaves used
it to lubricate their days and nights, like an oil of joy.
Poets and bards sang its praises in the hovels of plebes
and before the thrones of emperors, making wonderful works
of art that survive to this day. Romans were the world’s
first wine snobs, every bit as picky and condescending as
the worst of today’s epicurean assholes. While not
the first people to come up with the concept of vintage (the
Egyptians were doing it as far back as Tutankhamen) the Romans
glommed on to the idea and ran with it, assigning so many
qualifiers and descriptors to wine that it must have become
hard to tell what you were drinking. They invented the custom
of letting a bottle of wine breathe for a while before serving,
and, through their relentless desire for new and novel tastes,
caused the creation of dozens of new grape species.

No other substance was as important to Romans, or to our
understanding of their complex culture, or, and this is the
main point, to our understanding of our drunken history.

Let’s go visit.

Import and Export
Romans were never very accomplished at making goods for the
export trade. Their only real export was themselves, which
they sold at sword-point, and then charged insane taxes
for the privilege of living as they told you to. On the
other hand, they were mighty, one might even say obsessive,
importers, and right at the top of every lading sheet was
wine. They brought it to Rome from, literally, every corner
of their empire. Roman trade caravans and fleets journeyed
across mountains, crossed deserts and sailed oceans year-round
to keep thirsts quenched in the world’s jumpin-est
city. Their favorite imported wines came from Greece, Spain,
and around Transcaucasia (modern Turkey).

These
ancient wine connoisseurs created entire trade niches by
themselves as different importers started specializing in
different vintages. Needless to say, the best wines fetched
the most silver, but good wine was far more likely to incur
the lust of raiders, and import taxes (borne by the shippers,
not the receivers) increased with the quality of the wine.
Since most Romans drank mid-level table wines, these formed
the bulk of the import tonnage. Importers with a need for
quick cash, though, went after low-end wines. It was inexpensive
to ship and could be unloaded in bulk quantities.

Alongside an abundance of wine, the Romans
were nuts for importing fancy containers from which to drink it. This was especially
true of the wealthy, who loved showing off for their friends and rivals by serving
excellent, expensive wine in equally costly glasses.

The most beautiful, hardest to import,
and costliest were calices tepidique toreumata Nili, or “engraved
glasses from the warm Nile.” Made in Egypt by master crafters, Nile glasses
were etched with scenes from popular stories, and painted in soft, elegant hues.
Almost paper-thin, more broke in transit than ended up on Roman tables, but
this only added to their allure.

Running a close second to Nile glasses
were the wine cups imported from Parthia, a region toward the eastern edge of
the empire, near what we now call Pakistan. They were carved of murrina (fluorspar)
in a time consuming, exacting process that involved repeatedly
heating and cooling each cup while removing fissile leftovers
by impregnating the fluorspar with resin, usually myrrh.
Parthian cups were prized for their luster and for their
rich purple and red coloring, but were most noted for the
way they subtly altered the taste of wine, a result of the
myrrh aromatizing with the wine. Seasoned wine drinkers wiled
away many fine hours experimenting with Parthian cups, checking
how the cups changed the taste of different wines.

People with less money and more brains
contented themselves with earthenware glasses and simple cups carved from stone.
They seem to have taken the poet Martial at face value when he said, of the
hoopla surrounding wine consumption, “You will make the wine good by drinking
it.”

Gimme That Old Time Religion
Looking back through history, it’s hard to find another
populace that worshipped a larger or more complex array of
gods, demigods, immortal heroes and other assorted supernatural
beings than did the ancient Romans. They were great borrowers
and stealers. When they swept in and forcibly welcomed another
nation or territory to the Empire, the area’s indigenous
religion, instead of being stamped out, was embraced and
invited to continue operating with little interference from
the State. As a result, Rome positively frothed with spiritual
options—at least until the emperor Constantine lurched
onto the scene and told the people they had two choices:
One, they could become Christian, or, Two, they could develop
a deeper understanding of the various effects a spear has
on innards, but all that happened later.

There was, however, one constant amid the
chaos of Rome’s religious scene, a sort of hub around which every sect,
cult and faith revolved. Whether we’re talking about very ancient Etruscan
animism (where every rock, leaf, stream, shrub, etc., was thought to be the
home of an individual god), the almost equally ancient Hebrew cult of Judaism,
Greek Olympianism, the Mystery Cults of Isis (burgled whole-cloth from Egypt)
and Mithra, or even early, non-state-sponsored Christianity, wine figured, by
degrees, into all religious observances.

Some Romans made offerings of wine to their
gods in fancy temples, while others offered the same to favored trees or attractive
stones. They set out small cups of wine in their homes, where every good Roman
citizen kept a shrine. Some poured wine in secret, hidden in tiny rickety churches
devoted to a rabble-rousing flower child who, according to a growing percentage
of the population, once turned water into wine. Many
rites required worshippers to drink a fair few jugs of wine,
too, which wasn’t what you’d call
a hardship.

Like their Etruscan forebears, the majority
of Romans burned their dead. The body of the deceased was wrapped in linen and
placed on a tall metal or stone stretcher-like structure which had been erected
over a large stack of wood. Wine was then poured in honor of the deceased and
to propitiate the gods, and the wood set ablaze. After the flames of the pyre
died down, mourners poured wine on the ashes to cool them, then placed the ashes
in an urn, which was taken home by the next of kin. The quality of the urn varied,
depending on the wealth of the family and, probably, the dead guy’s overall
popularity, and might be made of anything from simple fired clay to hammered
gold. After nine days of mourning the family delivered the urn to their family
tomb. They poured more wine (following the Greek notion of “libations”)
honoring the gods so that they might grant the deceased a happy afterlife, and
sealed the urn inside the tomb. There followed a banquet, complete with wine
enough for all, and many hours of shouting, joking and flailing about, which,
because of the vast amount of wine present, may or may not have qualified as
dancing.

When Romans of a certain mindset really
wanted to spiritually cut loose, they traveled to the small rocky island of
Eryx off the coast of Sicily. For hundreds of years Greeks went there to worship
the goddess Aphrodite, and Romans continued the custom, paying homage to the
goddess they renamed Venus, patron of love and sex. Her worship days were pretty
much exactly what you think of when you hear the word “orgy.” For
hours and even days on end worshippers drank and danced, danced and screwed,
drank and screwed, and drank and drank and drank, and then enjoyed a long nap.

Back in Rome, stodgier elements of the
city tried to stop Venus worship, probably because it made them all-too acutely
aware of their own lack of charisma and sexual attractiveness. Their schemes
were routinely thwarted, however. Squads of sober, stiff-necked, sex-free nerds
didn’t stand a chance against a drunken horde of horny love zealots. Imagine
the Retirement Ministry from the First Baptist Church of Lawrence, Kansas marching
to invade and overthrow Las Vegas.

Other Uses
Wine was such an important part of daily life, that Rome’s
greatest physician, Galen, in his book On Good and Bad
Juices, proscribed it as a daily regimen for healthy,
happy living. He also suggested wines from different regions
as curatives for different ailments. Wine generally was given
to patients suffering from arthritis, gastric build-up and
depression, called an excess of dark humor. Some physicians
also saw the curative value of full-bore drunkenness, noting
(as drunkards have for centuries) that, upon the onset of
a cold, a good bender will leave the sufferer free of symptoms…once
the hangover departs, I assume.

Very strong, unwatered, wine was used as
an anesthetic for dental work, amputations, and even a limited kind of brain
surgery. The wine’s deadening effect didn’t last long, so a good
surgeon was a fast surgeon.

Mothers calmed fussy babies by having them
suck on a twist of wine-soaked cloth. If this failed to quiet the tot, some
mothers and wet nurses drank the wine themselves (lots of it), infusing their
milk with an ongoing (and, cleverly enough, portable) supply of the calmative.
As they got older, Roman children were given wine to drink with meals. They
softened their oatcakes in it at breakfast, and drank a cup or two with the
evening meal. It cannot be a coincidence that Roman children were known to be
particularly robust and well-behaved.

On the Road
“All roads lead to Rome.”
In the heyday of the Empire, this claim was more or less
entirely true. The creation of a network of roads linking
all corners of the Roman world to the city of Rome was one
of the supreme achievements of the Empire (and its vast bureaucracy).
Archeological traces of these roads can still be seen today,
and certain modern European motorways follow courses originally
plotted by Roman engineers over 1500 years ago.

In addition to performing regular maintenance
on these important arteries, Rome posted garrisons along them in order to insure
the safety of travelers and goods. The roads were constructed with state-of-the-art
technology, but that still meant cut-stone paving and traversing them in wooden-wheeled
carts and wagons was a bit like sitting in one of those paint-can shakers at
Home Depot. To alleviate the problem Rome arrived at a most excellent solution.
They erected inns at comfortable intervals, funded them with public money, and
regulated them, in some cases, right down to the décor. Some became so
well known they were destinations unto themselves, and many more were considered
to be some of the finest drinking establishments in the known world. These were
classy places. They can be compared to their modern counterparts, like, say,
a Motel 6, in much the same way as enjoying several bottles of exquisite red
wine over a fine meal served in elegant surroundings can be compared with sitting
naked in a wet hole, slurping Applejack and eating grass while lots of angry
ugly people fling poo at you.

Travelers with enough coin, or enough prestige,
or, happiest of all, both, could while away their stay at an inn doing…well…pretty
much anything they wanted.

Food was available ranging from light snacks
to multi-course gastronomic fantasies. Guests were free to eat in the privacy
of their rooms, but could also avail themselves of a table in the ground-floor
common room or rent one of several private banquet rooms. The wine made available
to guests came in even larger varieties than the food, and the quality and quantity
depended solely upon how much you wanted to spend. A decent, hardy red might
cost only a handful of coppers and the prices went up from there, right into
the monetary stratosphere, the sort of breathtaking vintage that only those
people right at the pinnacle of the economic mountain could even afford to look
at, let alone purchase and drink. But on the positive side of things, travelers
were free to drink as much as they could pay for. No one was cut off or 86’d
for drunkenness, so you could go ahead and get as sloppy as you wanted. You
could tipple your way right into a violent, yarking blackout (Crapulentus
sum!—“I’m so wasted!”) and, so long as you refrained
from killing anybody or insulting someone more important than you, you remained
free from managerial harassment. Besides, Roman inns had staff to spare, each
of them trained and ready to towel you off and prop you up in time to begin
round two. It was all part of the service.

One of the best reasons to drink at a quality
Roman inn was the astonishing variety of live entertainment they offered their
guests. You could hire an individual musician and have him quietly strum his
lyre in the corner, or a whole band—lyre, drum, flute, and optional vocalists—and
enjoy your wine to the accompaniment of a medley of popular ditties. If you
wanted something a little more active, jugglers and acrobats were available,
as were clowns who told naughty stories and lampooned the great and powerful.
On the off chance you were in the mood for a more contemplative drinking atmosphere,
many inns had philosophers at hand who, for a few pennies, would engage your
mind with tricky logical and epistemological conundrums. Strippers could be
hired, as could prostitutes, both ready to supply a feminine, er, touch, to
your evening, but the pinnacle of female entertainers were the ambubaiarum
collegia, or “companies of flute girls,” who, in a nutshell,
were dancing girls, but dancing girls of such renown, talent, and overall hotness,
they drove their audiences daffy with desire. The anonymous author of an ancient
text called the Copa described one such girl, named Surisca (“young
Syrian bar-girl”), who was emblematic of these fine ladies: “her
hair caught up in a Greek headband, trained to sway her quivering backside in
time to the castanet, dancing tipsily, wantonly, in the smoky tavern, smacking
the noisy reed-pipes against her elbow.” By the first century AD, they
had become so popular that they were given as gifts to powerful foreign kings,
most notably the Chinese emperor Han, who reserved a special place at his court
for these “skilled performers.”

How much better would your average bar be today if it staffed
a “company of flute girls”?

Dinner at Eight
Upper-class Romans were bonkers for fancy dinner parties.
No occasion was too small, no cost too great. Dinner parties
of similar sweep and decadence would not be part of the
upper-crust scene for another thousand years, when members
of the English and French aristocracy would elevate them
to even more eye-popping heights of ostentation and bad
taste.
Well-to-do Roman hosts competed to set the most expensive,
exotic table, wowing their guests with new and rare delicacies
from around the Empire—cold fish stews aswarm with
living guppies, bowls of sugared flamingo tongues, roasted
python stuffed with duck and swan, cutlets carved from bear,
elephant and giraffe, soft-boiled chicken eggs, complete
with a soft-boiled, half-formed chick inside, and wine, wine,
and more wine. Wine of every vintage, wine of every color,
wine by the gallon. Getting plowed while reclining on a chaise
and nibbling honey-dipped newborn mice was considered to
be the absolute acme of chic. The only tricky part of the
evening was that you had to regulate your alcohol intake
so that you got drunk but not so drunk that you said anything
that might, even remotely, be misconstrued or taken out of
context, and used later to cause you harm.

Wealthy Romans, especially those who were,
or aspired to be, close to the Emperor, were in almost constant danger of suffering
a painful, untidy death, and the quickest road to one was to let yourself get
all lip-flappy at a dinner party. The other guests were not your friends. They
were pieces in your machination of the day, just as you were theirs, and in
the game of Political Advancement, information was hard coin. One slip of the
tongue, one spilled opinion, was all it took for you to find yourself on the
less-snuggly end of a really sharp short sword. Even the seemingly benign act
of describing to your fellow guests the dream you had last night could, if someone
interpreted it to his advantage, result in your making the sudden, ugly and
thoroughly final acquaintance of a well-starved tiger
who cared not one whit that your dream about slurping honeyed
wine from the navel of a serving girl had absolutely nothing
to do with the Emperor’s eldest daughter.

All of which brings us to the vomitorium, that
fabled room found in every high-end Roman home where one
adjourned to divest oneself of those things which the evening
had so far required you to put in your stomach. The very existence of such rooms
has been hotly debated among antiquity scholars. Those who say that vomitoria never
existed seem to feel so out of the thinly-veiled but well-nurtured
idea that Romans were simply too hip and with it to engage in something as yucky
as vomiting on demand, while those on the pro side of the question maintain
that a bit of intentional upchuck in no way blightens ancient Roman achievement.

The simple facts are these: while there
may or may not have been special rooms in Roman homes devoted to regurgitation,
many partiers, upon finding themselves unsafely snockered, took themselves away
and used a finger, or the finger of a handy slave who’d been coached-up,
to induce the contents of their insides to rejoin the larger outside world.
They did this so that they might return to the dinner party and continue drinking
with fresh control over their untrustworthy mouths. That the act also made it
possible for you to keep drinking for hours, and even days, on end without the
possibility of a horrifically dangerous blackout and without suffering an inconvenient
or incapacitating hangover, did not go unnoticed by savvy Roman winesots.

So what, then, constituted safe dinner
party conversation? Probably the most popular was sex. Since naming names would’ve
been mind-bogglingly stupid, the talk remained general and theoretical, yet
it was simultaneously pornographic. That many ritzy Roman dinner parties ended
in orgiastic couplings should come as no surprise to anyone.

Convivium
In ancient Greece learned and powerful citizens met in the
evening for wine and conversation, in events called symposia. They
drank many bowls of strong wine while talking politics,
art and philosophy. Years later, Romans with letters and
learning revived the idea, calling it a convivium after
the warm and convivial feeling that overtakes people upon
consuming lots and lots of good red vino.

Throwing a convivium was really
simple. All the host had to do was gather a small collection
of smart, well-connected people, dispense a bounty of top-notch imported wine,
kickstart the conversation with a provocative query, and enjoy. The Romans altered
Greek custom a bit by occasionally allowing women to attend. (Many Roman women,
the wives and daughters of powerful men, were forces unto themselves and didn’t take to exclusion
with the meekness of their Greek forebears.) And, Rome being Rome, a convivium was
a lot more ostentatious than a symposium; the food,
the wine, and the surroundings were much more plush. The
poet Martial describes the scene of one gathering, held at
the lavishly furnished country villa owned by one of his
patrons: “couches encrusted with first grade tortoiseshell, solid Maurusian
citronwood of a weight rarely seen, silver and gold on a fancy tripod, and boys
standing to attention” ready to serve the guests’ every need.

From time to time the convivium was
preceded by a fine meal in the host’s dining area. At the end of the feast
the host lead his guests in a game called a commissatio, a
ritualized drinking contest. The host and the host alone
dictated the terms of the contest—number
of cups to be consumed, from one to eleven, the order in which guests drank,
etc. Each guest was expected to drink his cup dry in one long pull without removing
it from his lips. Every guest participated, drinking as many cups as the host
demanded. Refusing to participate was a massive breach of etiquette that could
lead to the party pooper’s exclusion from future convivia, or
even to his being ostracized by Rome’s movers and shakers. Almost as bad as
shirking one’s drinking obligations was belching in the middle of the
game. If someone suddenly felt a burp coming on, he was bound by custom to hold
it in until he could get out of the room. A little strict perhaps, but those
were the rules.

The closest thing we have today to a convivium is,
sadly, the book-club meeting. The resounding difference between
the two is that the conversation at a convivium often resulted in far-reaching
changes in state policy or a profound philosophical insight into the nature
of the universe, while book-club meetings rarely result in anything more than
tipsy repetitions of “I really liked it!” and the giddy sipping
of wine coolers.

What a good time a true convivium must
have been.

The Neighborhood
Take a walk around any fair-sized city and you are likely
to discover a neighborhood almost wholly given over to the
needs of drunkards—bars every few feet, lots of options
for cheap food, convenient flop houses, and lax policing.
Rome’s incarnation was called the Subura, and,
like in Frank Miller’s Sin City, you could knock on
any door there and get anything you wanted. Anything.

Most upper-crust Romans went out
of their way to avoid the Subura. The poet Virgil
derided it as “greasy,” Pliny
said it smelled bad, and while other critics weren’t even that nice,
the Subura wore their scorn as a badge of honor. It
was the sort of place that frightened people who put too
much stock in their own status and self worth. Which is not
to say that these types never visited. For some, the potential
for fun was too great to ignore. The statesman Gallus, nephew
of Constantine the Great, was a regular. He came costumed
as a plebe, and would spend the night drinking wine and asking
strangers what they thought of “that fellow Gallus.” Emperor
Nero himself loved the Subura. He too visited in disguise,
but since he didn’t give two figs what the people thought of him, spent his nights
drinking whole jugs of wine as he reeled from brothel to brothel in a hedonistic
stupor.

There was lots to do in the Subura. The
place had a carnival atmosphere and nothing ever closed.
It was the original “city
that doesn’t sleep.” Everywhere you looked people sold stuff, hawking
their goods from the doors of rickety shops, shouting to make themselves heard
over the din. Depending upon your mood, you might take in a naughty play, or
throw dice in one of the many dozens of gambling parlors, or perhaps lay a small
wager on a cockfight or on the outcome of a deadly match between trained war
dogs and an enraged rhinoceros. One of the Subura’s principle
attractions were the Suburabae puellae, or, “girls of the Subura,” the
most revered prostitutes in the land. They were expensive, but apparently worth
it. If you lacked the funds for such an extravagant night of slap-n-tickle,
however, you could always lower your standards (such as they are) and rent a
more common street walker for a few tawdry minutes in a dingy, screened inscripta
cella, an “alcove with a price list.” No matter what you found
to do with your evening, however, you did it with wine. The stuff practically
ran through the streets.

Wine was available in shops dedicated to the purpose, comfortable
joints of varying quality, but none so spiffy you would want
to enter unarmed. They announced their wares with signs reading asse
vinum, or “wine for an as (a few pennies).” Vendors
pushed winecarts through the smoky streets selling cheaper
wine for a few coppers, everyone drinking from the same common
dipper.

If you felt like you’d had enough fun, you could rent
a cot in a flophouse, where, even as you slept, the party
continued, as several thousand of your bedmates—also
known as fleas—threw a little insect rave in your hair.
If you lacked the cash for a cot or were not the sort of
person who associated with fleas, you still had options.
Many dark alleys and out-of-the-way gutters presented themselves
to wineheads in need of naps. There was always the danger
of being robbed while you slept, but snoozing in gutters
generally disabused thieves of the notion that you had anything
worth stealing. Even members of the local garrison, soldiers
pressed into duty as peace-keepers, would probably leave
you alone. The odds that a given soldier was as drunk or
drunker than you were about even. Instead of arresting you,
a soldier was more likely to buy you a cup of wine or poke
you with his sword until you rolled out of bed and got the
hell away from his fleas.
There was no such thing as being too drunk in the Subura. Being
too sober…well…that’s another story.

The Great Outdoors
Romans liked to kick around out in the country, on picnics
and so forth, soaking up the sun and snoozing in the tall
cool grass. The poet Martial described such a scene:

As you recline in the flowery meadow, where a stream rippling between sparkling
banks stirs the pebbles, and all your troubles are far away, may you crush ice
into your black measure of wine, your brow red with garlands and just one most
innocent girl to tickle your fancy.
Of all the places Romans like to drink, this one, to me,
sounds best.

Conclusion
The drinking habits and customs of ancient Rome are simultaneously
just like ours and completely different. But, details aside,
Rome is a vital part of our drunken history. Many of their
ways are now our ways, a perfect illustration of how some
aspects of human behavior are Good and have Staying Power.

Next time some cop pulls you over give
him a dose of ancient Rome, just to see how he reacts. Unroll your window, present
him with the pertinent documents, slap a friendly smile on your face, look him
spang in the eye, and say: